A Study Of Female Sacrifice In George Eliot’s Novels From The Perspective Of Psychoanalysis

In the history of English literature in the 19 th century,George Eliot（1819-1880）is a significant female novelist.Her works have captured the true lives of Victorians,particularly women.As a female writer in a patriarchal society,Eliot has a profound awareness of the situation and psychological conditions of women in this time.The self-sacrificing spirit of the female characters throughout George Eliot’s works is evident,but the objects they sacrifice for and the motivations behind the sacrifices are diverse.However,according to Jacques Lacan,women’s sacrifices are actions motivated by their reliance on “the Other”.Not only do women’s voluntary sacrifices reflect their identifications with “the Other”,but their rebellions are also cunningly incorporated by“the Other”.This thesis begins with the concept of “sacrifice”,combining the demand for sacrifice for women in Victorian culture with Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory,making a comparative analysis of the sacrifices of the two heroines in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch,and seeks to explore the ideology behind the female sacrifice under the male-centered discourse.The main body of this thesis consists of three parts.The first part examines Maggie Tulliver’s sacrifice in The Mill on the Floss.From openly resisting the Other’s requirement of sacrifice in her childhood,to deceiving the Other through pretending to sacrifice in her youth,and then to being swallowed by the Other after her deception failed,the process of Maggie’s destruction is revealed.And it shows that the sacrifice of the hysteric is under the gaze of the Other.The second part analyzes the sacrifice of Dorothea Brooke,a “St.Theresa”-like woman in Middlemarch.She takes sacrifice for the Other as her divine vocation,constantly creates new fantasies,and repeats the act of sacrifice to confirm the existence and significance of the Other,in order to confirm her self-value.Through the analysis of this process,the psychological motivation of the pervert who persistently devotes him/herself to the Other is disclosed.In the third part,this thesis combines the fates of these two characters with the author’s life experience to reveal the influence of the deception of the Other in the Victorian era on George Eliot’s thought and her creation of female characters.By analyzing these two types of female sacrifice in these representative works,Eliot’s distinctive thinking on the plight of Victorian women and her limitations can be revealed.Women’s sacrifice,in Eliot’s view,is a method for them to take charge and realize their worth,but with the help of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory,this thesis reveals that female sacrifice is caught in the cobweb of the Other and becomes a passive gesture.The personal developments of women may only be fulfilled by seeing through the deception of the Other in the patriarchal society and breaking free from the limitations of ideology.